Book Presentation of ‘East Dreams’
Nastassja Martin copyright Mathieu Génon
French anthropologist Natassja Martin’s new book East of Dreams is a record of her seven years spent among the Even people of the Kamchatka Peninsula in the Russian Far East. Dispossessed of their reindeer herds during the Soviet era, the Evens were, like many indigenous peoples, resettled on collective farms until the fall of the USSR. East of Dreams centres on a single family, led by their matriarch, Daria, who decided to refuse those terms, returning to the forests of Kamchatka during the final years of the Soviet Union, and to a self-sustained life of fishing, hunting, and gathering. There, along the river Icha, they have managed to preserve a way of life antithetical to the enforced urban modernity to which so many of their compatriots were made subject.
Martin’s previous research has centered on animism and some of the largest questions of humanity’s relationship with nature. In her fieldwork (she has also lived among indigenous Alaskans, on the opposite side of the Bering Strait), Martin seeks the deepest involvement with the peoples whom she studies. East of Dreams is her most ambitious work yet, a moving collective portrait of the Evens’ fight to reclaim their autonomy and an expressive depiction of the force, beauty, and mystery of the natural world. The book is also an engaging work of natural history about a place where many of the central ecological and political issues of our time—colonial extraction, climate catastrophe, land contestation—collide. From her years with the Evens, Martin has composed a powerful study of a people’s struggle to recover their identity and, in so doing, learn to dream anew.
East of Dreams by Nastassja Martin, translated from the French by Sophie R. Lewis (New York Review Books; Publication Date: May 12, 2026, ISBN: 9-781-68137-934-0; £16.99; Trade Paperback; 312 pages).
Nastassja Martin is a French author and anthropologist who has studied the Gwich’in people of Alaska and the Even people of the Kamchatka Peninsula. She is the author of the memoir In the Eye of the Wild and is the recipient of the Prix Louis-Castex from the French Academy.
Sophie R. Lewis is an editor and a translator from French and Portuguese. She has translated works by Stendhal, Jules Verne, Marcel Aymé, Violette Leduc, Emmanuelle Pagano, and João Gilberto Noll, among others. Her translation of Noémi Lefebvre’s Blue Self-Portrait was shortlisted for both the Scott Moncrieff Prize and the Republic of Consciousness Prize in 2018.
In East of Dreams, Nastassja Martin offers readers a literary pleasure and poses one of the major political questions of our time, reexamining colonialism and the foreseeable as well as clear-and-present consequences of climate change: Does the notion of 'capitalism' encompass all aspects of modernity?
—Marc Lebiez, En attendant Nadeau
Nastassja Martin's East of Dreams brings Claude Lévi-Strauss's masterpiece, Tristes Tropiques, immediately to mind.
—Pascal Ruffenach, La Croix
